Francesco P. Di Teodoro, Raphael, Baldassar Castiglione and the 'Letter to Pope Leo X'

Translation by Francesco Mazzaferro
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Francesco P. Di Teodoro

Raffaello, Baldassar Castiglione e la Lettera a Leone X
(Raphael, Baldassar Castiglione and the Letter to Pope Leo X)
“With your help I will try to vindicate the few things remaining from death …”

Bologna, Nuova Alfa Editoriale, 1994

Raphael (?), Presumed Self-Portrait, Florence, Uffizi Gallery

SEE ALSO THE REVIEW OF THE 2020 EDITION

Who wrote it?

The Letter to Pope Leo X  by Raphael and Baldassare Castiglione is a text, which is always cited by experts. However, there are many open questions on it, starting from its authorship. It was by Raphael or by Baldassare Castiglione? Or again, by Fabio Calvo, Baldassare Peruzzi, Donato Bramante, Leonardo da Vinci, as it has been heard over the years? The Letter, which is incomplete, was due to serve as an introduction to a book or at least to a series of drawings, constituting the graphic representation of Rome and its ancient ruins; the task had been attributed to Raphael by Pope Leo X. In fact, it now seems well established (and Francesco Paolo Di Teodoro helps to dissolve any remaining doubt about it) that this was a work at four hands, done by Baldassare Castiglione and Raphael Sanzio. An often omitted question is: Why a work at four hands? Why not a work by the only Raphael? The reason is simple: Raphael wrote rather scarcely and in a particularly inelegant way. Thankfully, he was fully conscious of this. For example, he knew only the rudiments of Latin, which is why, when his interest in the antiquities and architecture grew (let us not forget that the artist was appointed superintendent of the work of the new Basilica of St. Peter in 1515) he asked Fabio Calvo, an humanist from Ravenna and friend of him, to translate for him the De Architectura by Vitruvius [1]. The intervention by Baldassare Castiglione, the author of the Cortegiano (The Book of the Courtier) and also a friend of the Umbrian painter, has exactly the same purpose: he acts as an assistant, coming from the world of letters, to package the Letter with elegance, erudition and form, which Raphael alone would never have been able to achieve.

The three versions of the Letter

Three versions of the work have reached us. We are mentioning them in chronological order of discovery. The first one is also the first printed version. We are in 1733 and the brothers Giovanni Antonio and Gaetano Volpi print an edition of the Letter in Padua, basing themselves on a manuscript at that time owned by Scipione Maffei. The publication takes place as part of the publication of the entire works of Baldassare Castiglione. The manuscript, today, is lost. Only in 1834, a manuscript (code 37b of the Bavarian State Library in Munich) is tracked down, containing a new version of the text, which is published in 1847. In 1910 instead, a third specimen is found, at the hand of Baldassarre, in the archives of the counts Castiglioni (i.e. the heirs). Incredibly, a full transcript of this third specimen, preserved in Mantua, had never been printed before this edition.

To be precise, that provided by Di Teodoro, is the critical edition of all three versions of the Letter, separately from each other. It gives great attention to the differences between the three texts; reconstructs the possible chronology of the versions (first of all is the manuscript of Mantua, and from it are generated in a separate way the Munich manuscript and the disappeared one from which the edition of Padua of 1733 is drawn); provides a possible date to the work (between mid-September and early November of 1519); and adds a broad supporting documentary material, presented in such a convincing a manner that one cannot say anything else but that this is a masterful work [2].

Raphael, Portrait of Baldassar Castiglione, Paris, Louvre Museum

The Letter and the need for preservation of the remains of Ancient Rome

It is often said that Raphael was appointed by Pope Leo X as 'Commissioner of Antiquities of Rome'. This is not entirely correct, in the sense that there is no document really proving it. In 1515, Raphael was commissioned 'only' to conserve the marbles and the stones bearing inscriptions, but it is also conceivable that the area of intervention of the artist has been gradually expanding informally. What is certain is that there is a common feeling between Raphael and Pope Leo. "It does not wonder that from Pope Leo X, Giovanni de Medici [editor's note: the son of Lorenzo the Magnificent], educated at the sophisticated Florentine humanist culture, came the order to Raphael to design an antiquarian map of Rome and that this project has sprouted from the passionate research of Roman "antiquarian" cultural circles, gravitating around his bountiful and beautiful court"(p. 171). Beyond the rhetorical expressions with which Baldassare and Raphael pay tribute to the greatness of the Pope, it is clear that one feels a common need to safeguard what remains of ancient Rome, starting from the 'mapping' of the territory and its emergencies. A sensitivity purported to the protection which, of course, has made the text of this letter especially dear to all art historians.

A technical or literary text?

If in front of the ruins of Rome the humanists of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries stop to the literary experience (it is the classic pattern of ‘Roma quanta fuit ipsa ruina docet’ ‘How great it was the fall of Rome itself teaches’), the text of Baldassare Castiglione and Raphael lives in a double dimension: the need of technical detection of the territory marries the humanistic one (clearly chiselled with elegance from the latter). If the first part of the Letter has therefore a purely literary nature, the second one shows the artist, and to be precise, more the architect than the painter. Raphael (one might say, here much more Raphael than Castiglione) describes the methodology used for the relief of the ancient buildings of Rome: "The measurements were taken with the aid of a graduated instrument including a compass, whose implementation is described in detail" (p.192) [3] The instructions follow, indicating how to scale the measurements. "The author of the Letter insists that the architectural design should consist of ‘three parts, the first of which is the map, or – if you want to say – a flat design, the second one is the external wall with its ornaments, the third one is the inside wall with its ornaments’, that is map, elevation and section" (p. 196). How much Raphael identified himself in his part at this time, is something that is clear from his insistence on ‘architectural’ drawing as opposed to classical perspective (which is typical of the painter): one cannot aim at correctly detecting the measurement of buildings, by resorting to prospective drawing.

Raphael, Portrait of Pope Leo X with cardinals Giulio de' Medici and Luigi de' Rossi, Florence, Uffizi Gallery

The antiquarian map and the drawings of Rome

At this point, the Letter stops [4]. The reason seems obvious. Raphael died at the age of 37 in April 1520. One can legitimately ask how much of the original plan of representation and measurement of ancient Rome has actually been achieved. We know from the text that the project involved the detection of buildings divided by ‘regiones’ (something very similar to today's quarters). In a letter dated 11 April 1520 (discovered in 1834), Marcantonio Michiel writes that Raphael died "with universal sorrow for all, and above all for the persons of letter, and for them more than for others, although even for painters and architects, he drafted a book [...] on antique buildings of Rome, showing so clearly their proportions, forms and ornaments [...]; and he had already produced the first region" (p. 18). The drawings by Raphael never reached us. But to corroborate the indication by Michiel, Di Teodoro flags that in an inventory of the workshop of the heirs of Francesco Rosselli, the most famous cosmographer of the time, the presence of six books of drawings by Raphael was listed in Florence in 1525, (in 'royal sheets', i.e. large ones), and 18 other smaller notebooks. And three years later, the executor of Rosselli quotes again the books, this time clearly identifying them as the "printed sheets of the drawings of Rome by Raphael from Urbino and of other ones." We are therefore reasonably certain that Michiel was right. In the documents from Mantua relating to the Letter, it is also said of the creation of a universal plan of Rome, to be made by operating the measurements from the hills of the City, with a very similar procedure to that proposed by Leon Battista Alberti in the Descriptio Urbis Romae (Description of the town of Rome). It is the curator’s view (and we agree with him) that such a map would have been fully functional to the project of detection, providing an overview that would allow him to better understand the physical distances between the individual buildings. On the other hand, the fact that this is mentioned only in fragments found in the cards from Mantova, and nothing is repeated instead in subsequent versions, could simply mean that this subject should possibly have been discussed in the part of the Letter that was never completed: "Limiting the scope of the restoration only to the buildings, even if included in an "album", would not have done justice to the great project of Raphael, for the exempla would have seemed divorced from history; instead, it is also about the history that the Letter does want to give reason. Even for the realization of the "antiquarian map", which would have kept the memory of the ancient buildings [...], the Letter is without doubt the first document that testifies to the awareness, on the part of an architect, of the problems related to the protection of monumental emergencies" (p. 177).

The Gothic

Of course, the argument is so charming that we could go on forever. It is not the case. We like then to close with a maybe not famous feature of the Letter (of which one has rightly highlighted the early interests for the protection of the artistic heritage), namely the harsh judgment that Raphael and Baldassare Castiglione expressed on the architecture of the 'Goti' (Goths). Here Goths mean of course a bit everything. The Goths are generally the barbarians, those who first have vandalized the city, but it also encompasses those 'Germans' who have lived in Rome before humanism. Well, embodying the true spirit of the Renaissance, Raphael notes that there are only three types of buildings in Rome: those of the ancient Romans, destroyed by the Goths and other barbarians; the buildings built by the Goths during their domination; and, finally, the modern buildings, which although chronologically distant, are linked to antiquity much better than the Gothic monuments do (p. 178). Raphael really links himself to the classical tradition by jumping across the Middle Ages, and gives a perfect definition of the Renaissance. And again: "The beginning of the awakening of architecture begins from the work of the ‘Germans’, who, however, were ‘far away from the beautiful manner of the Romans’ and their ornaments were ‘clumsy’. In fact, to the Gothic architecture is recognized only its structural value, the ‘machinery of the entire building’. Where the Romans had ‘beautiful frames, beautiful friezes, beams, columns of very ornate capitals and bases and measured with proportion to the man and the woman’ the Germans ‘for ornament often put only a few small crouched and poorly done figures to support beams, as well as strange and clumsy animals and figures and foliage for every natural reason" (p. 188-189). Those that Raphael used as arguments to dismiss the medieval Gothic art are certainly not arguments for religious order related to the Reformation (Luther published his thesis only two years before, and there was a severe underestimation of the Protestant phenomenon, who will be included in its entirety only with the sack of Rome in 1527), but purely for stylistic reasons; and are the same arguments (in this sense we perceive the change in taste over the centuries) that will lead from the mid nineteenth century onwards to the revaluation of the Gothic itself.

NOTES

[1] See Vitruvio e Raffaello: il “De architectura” di Vitruvio nella traduzione inedita di Fabio Calvo ravennate (Vitruvius and Raphael: the "De architectura" by Vitruvius in the unpublished translation of Fabio Calvo from Ravenna), by Vincenzo Fontana and Paolo Morachiello, Rome, Officina Edizioni, 1975

[2] It would be really interesting, for example, to report the whole discussion made to frame the real discovery of the Letter as part of the neoclassical climate of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Unfortunately, we do not have space to do it. We will only mention that, not surprisingly, a version of the letter is also presented by Quatremère de Quincy, author of Letters to Miranda, in his biography of Raphael (1824), translated into Italian in 1829.

[3] More generally, on the subject of detection techniques of urban land, see Daniela Stroffolino, La città misurata. Tecniche e strumenti di rilevamento nei trattati a stampa del Cinquecento (The measured city. Techniques and detection tools in printed treatises of the sixteenth century). Rome, Salerno publisher, 1999.

[4] To be precise, in the Munich manuscript appears a final section (it is not sure that it is due to duo Castiglione-Raphael), which somehow reintroduces the usefulness of perspective drawing, fundamentally for aesthetic purposes.